The joke behind Bad Religion’s Christmas Songs is that it is a band called Bad Religion performing Christmas songs. That’s it, that’s the joke. It was also the joke when Bad Religion performed annually on KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas show—a joke so thin that the band itself laughed off repeated requests to record a proper studio Christmas album for years.
When they at long last deigned to do so in 2013, it was only EP length, got only the most basic of titles, featured no originals (aside from their 1991 anti-Gulf War anthem “American Jesus”), and was primarily produced as a fundraiser for an organization that helps victims of sex-abuse by Priests—which, while a noble cause, was also clearly chosen for the further irony.
The album itself only garnered mixed reviews at the time: too abrasive for the TIME-LIFE Christmas crowd obviously, but also not nearly abrasive enough for the Punk crowd in general and Bad Religion fans in particular. (When websites rank Bad Religion albums, it makes a pretty easy slot for least essential record.) Although the band does get a little inventive on a couple tracks (e.g. using the riff from The Ramones “I Wanna Be Sedated” on “White Christmas;” playing the finale to Dead Kennedy’s “California Uber Alles” at the start of “Little Drummer Boy”), these are overall surprisingly straightforward covers of old Christmas hymns. They never seem to lean into the joke. If you were unfamiliar with the band, you might even call them sincere homages.
And here’s the thing: maybe they are! In fact, that’s the idea I would like to take seriously today, more than a decade after Christmas Song’s release. Cause I can’t shake the feeling that frontman Greg Graffin, though famously irreligious and a lifelong atheist, seems to harbor some real affection for Christmas, perhaps almost in spite of himself. George Carlin famously quipped that “If you scratch a cynic, you will find a disappointed idealist,” and it may be worth speculating for a minute as to whether Bad Religion’s beef all these decades has been with, well, religion itself, or religion’s recurrent failure to live up to it’s own purported ideals.
After all, Bad Religion’s very first track on their very first 1981 EP—on the self-titled song that gave the band its name—Graffin belts out: “Spiritual era’s gone, it ain’t coming back/bad religion, a cop out, that is all that’s left.” Granted that Graffin was still a teenager at the time, and hunting for deeper meaning in Punk lyrics is generally a fool’s game anyways; nevertheless, it’s difficult not to read between the lines here a latent nostalgia for a time when we were in a Spiritual era, when we had good religion, and not just the “cop-out” that’s been left us.
To tie back to Christmas Songs: it is worth noting that the songs the band plays the straightest—the ones with no ‘70s Punk interpolations whatsoever—are the most traditionally religious ones: “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O Come All Ye Thankful,” “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “What Child Is This,” and “Angels We Have Heard On High.” And it is equally worth emphasizing that each of these hymns are about the coming of Christ specifically: the man who flipped over the tables of the money changers, who told the rich young man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor, who declared that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, and whose followers established a society wherein they “had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:44-45) only 50 days after his death and resurrection.
And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that this version of Christ Jesus is exactly the sort of person that Greg Graffin (regardless of whether he would ever credit any of the miracles attributed to him) could unambiguously appreciate! The vast majority of Bad Religion’s lyrics after all are not about religion whatsoever, but leftist politic causes, ones that advocate for a more humane, equitable, generous, and just society—one wherein we really do (as per Matthew 25) feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, and take in the stranger—which society Christ was clearly sent to inaugurate! James 1:27 reads “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction,” and I suspect even Grafin would agree that such really would be Good Religion, if we ever dared to practice it en masse. (Relatedly, the cover art for Christmas Songs is a famed photo of an orphan receiving a pair of shoes from the Red Cross; it is both a reminder of who we should be caring for—“the fatherless…in their affliction”—and a stinging indictment of a society that lets orphans get so maltreated in the first place. As the Brazilian priest Helder Camara once said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”)
It is also not a novel insight to note that the vast majority of mainstream Christianity over the past 2,000 years has not even tried to live up to that vision—that it has in fact actively resisted a society wherein we have “all things common,” down to the present moment—a fact so obvious that even a 15-year-old Greg Graffin in 1981 could call it “a cop out,” a “bad religion,” and not the good one that was promised. Ezekiel 16:49 reads “Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy,” and these are the true sins of Sodom—this incessant failure to care for the poor—that persist among the religious to this day. As Abraham Joshua Heschel famously wrote in his 1955 treatise God In Search of Man: “Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, and insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion–its message becomes meaningless.” What Heschel describes here is Bad Religion indeed, long before the Punk band ever came into being.
Ironically, the one time of year when most self-professed Christians even try to treat each other with generosity and humanity—when we really do give to each other freely “without money and without price”—is during the Christmas season. In fact, it is exactly Christendom’s tendency to quarantine off their generosity to only the last one of two months of the year, that I suspect Bad Religion is calling out here. If there’s any sarcasm at all on Bad Religion’s Christmas Songs EP, it is in how they needle Christianity for its general failure to live up to its own ideals, repeatedly and recurrently; like Christ Himself to the Scribes and Pharisees, they call out the hypocrisy of the religiously conservative by belting out their own hymns with more conviction than they ever do.